The Syntax-Pragmatics Merger: Belief Reports in the Theory of Default Semantics

Abstract

This paper is a voice in the ongoing discussion on the source and properties of pragmatic inference that contributes to the representation of discourse meaning. I start off from the contextual standpoint of truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP, Recanati, Linguist Philos 25:299–345, 2002; Recanati, Embedded implicatures. http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents, 2003; Recanati, Literal meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004) and develop a proposal of representations of utterance meaning, the so-called merger representations, that incorporate the output of pragmatic inference. The move from TCP to pragmatics-rich semantics of acts of communication is facilitated by rethinking the compositionality of meaning and predicating compositionality of such pragmatics-rich structures. I argue that the advantage of ‘semanticizing’ the output of pragmatic sources of meaning is that we can relax the view on compositionality of meaning and offer an algorithm of the interaction of such sources where the requirement of compositionality is imposed on the output of the interaction rather than on the output of the syntactic processing of the sentence.

This proposal is applied to belief reports for which it offers representations of their various readings, conceived of on the scale of ‘weakening’ intentionality and ‘weakening’ referential intention that proceeds from the ‘strong’ de re reading, through the ‘de dicto with a referential mistake’, to ‘de dicto proper’. Merger representations for these readings are provided in the amended language of Discourse Representation Theory that is used in my Default Semantics framework (e.g. Jaszczolt, Default semantics: foundations of a compositional theory of acts of communication. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005a; Jaszczolt, Default semantics. In: Heine B, Narrog H (eds) The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 193–221, 2010; Jaszczolt, Meaning in Linguistic Interaction. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press).

This is a revised and updated version of my paper that appeared in Pragmatics and Cognition 15(1), 2007, pp. 41–64, reprinted with kind permission of John Benjamins Publishing Company. Many thanks to Manuel García-Carpintero and Alessandro Capone for their comments on the earlier draft.